Humans have had an undeniable impact on the global environment -- there is really no point in questioning that anymore. As for dying, well, nobody is claiming that our doom is near at hand, just that things are going to get a lot different and that we should be prepared for it, and perhaps taking steps to slow or halt the rate at which we emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We are already over the edge; it is a question of whether or not we want to worsen things for ourselves (or at least make things change more significantly than they are already destined to change).
Last I checked, a high end GPU costs quite a bit more than $1.68, and if you are just going to crack a few WPA keys, why would you want to spend so much money?
The problem is that the AMBER Alert system was created as the result of a moral panic -- a widespread belief that strangers who want to harm children are all over the place, waiting to kidnap an innocent child. If the AMBER Alert program was actually saving children from harm, I could shrug off the fact that it is symptomatic of a moral panic, because the benefits would outweigh the costs. Yet independent researchers have found that the system has done nothing to save children from harm, and that in cases where standard police techniques fail to rescue a child, AMBER alerts almost always fail. Worse, though, is that law enforcement agencies and politicians are parading AMBER as a system that is saving lives, which actually serves to reinforce the very moral panic that gave rise to AMBER in the first place.
The moral panic is really the problem here. As some have pointed out, most people will help a child who asks for help; kidnappers are extremely rare. Yet we are constantly telling children to never talk to strangers, and so a lost child might actually fail to ask for help from people who could offer it (perhaps by using a cell phone). Elsewhere in the comments, someone cited a case of a man who left a lost toddler out in the middle of nowhere, because he did not want to risk being labelled as a predator or kidnapper.
Finally, researchers have pointed out that if AMBER were used properly, it would not be very successful. In most cases, when a child is kidnapped by someone who intends to do the child harm, the kidnapper harms the child before the police have a chance to determine that the case meets the criteria for an AMBER alert. This trend is reflected by the evidence that AMBER alerts fail to save lives in cases where standard police techniques fail.
So, while the tiny handful of parents who got lucky and had their children saved by an AMBER alert would probably disagree, I would say that all of the time, energy, and money that went into the AMBER system could be better spent on something else.
Well, he is already being punished; it is to the point where he has to be given antidepressants just to be kept alive. He is not allowed to have bedsheets, last I checked (I assume this is because he might try to hang himself). He has been in solitary confinement for many months now, which is extremely difficult to endure and which can have long lasting or even permanent effects on people.
I suppose there might be some disagreement on the meaning of "right to a speedy trial" or "due process," but I am a bit confused as to how the treatment of Manning passes constitutional muster. I understand that he is subject to military law, not civilian law, but it is still troubling.
I can't speak for him, but I certainly think it is bad. These sorts of restricted and locked down computers (yes, we are talking about computers, even if they are dressed differently) are a bad thing for society. Now, as for the impact on the open web, I suppose one could argue that video game systems are not drawing efforts away from websites (nobody is talking publishing newspapers exclusively on video game consoles, last I checked), but the broader effect on society (e.g. dividing people, keeping free software out) is largely the same.
Worse still, Linux distros that toss H.264 into their repositories could be left in a precarious position -- do they need to use the "as part of an OS" license structure, the "not as part of an OS license structure," or what? Users who download the software over BitTorrent could also be left in a precarious position -- do they owe money to MPEG LA also?
It is really a simple matter: H.264 licensing is not compatible with free software licensing or the free software distribution model. Why anyone would say otherwise is a mystery to me.
I guess we could all argue semantics but the definition of Free/Open Source really needs to be expanded to specifically exclude patent-encumbered technologies that do not grant unlimited, royalty-free use in both commercial and non-commercial uses alike.
Sure, we can stick with H.264, just as soon as we invalidate software patents. Or if MPEG LA suddenly decides to relicense H.264 so that it is compatible with libre licenses.
From a free software perspective, H.264's license structure is completely incompatible with the philosophy. Examples:
The license for H.264 makes a distinction between software that is distributed for incorporation into an OS, and software that is not; libre software frequently falls into both categories, or even into a middle ground as part of a repository system.
A distinction is made between videos that are distributed at no cost; the free software movement has never made such a distinction for either software or for the output of software.
The license structure is royalty free only if less than 100000 "units" are shipped; free software licenses place no limit on how many copies of a program may be redistributed, and novel distribution methods like BitTorrent would turn H.264 royalty payments into a nightmare.
The problem is that H.264's license structure is based around traditional producer-consumer relationships, which is not compatible with the concept behind free software. Royalty payments are inherently incompatible with the free software model, because it prevents people from liberally copying and sharing software. Note that royalties are the problem; other payment models are perfectly fine (I can, for example, charge you money for copies of Debian -- prior to widely available broadband connections, this sort of thing was not so uncommon).
H264 is not open, it is patent encumbered, it will not be open until all relevant (a word which has become very stretched recently) patents have expired. The Ars article tries to address this by claiming that there are no royalties that need to be paid for videos that can be accessed without a paywall; yet the document they cite says this is only for "0 - 100,000 units" which clearly creates a problem for libre software that has millions of users. Furthermore, the line that the licensing terms draws for "(a)" and "(b)" sublicensing is artificial and wholly incompatible with free software licensing.
If only it were a simple matter of technology, we could all agree with you. Unfortunately, H264 is a serious problem in the USA, because of software patents and license requirements. You cannot produce legal free software H264 editors in this country, nor can you import legally produced software from other countries. True, patent trolls will probably find a way to corrupt WebM, but at least they would have to put some effort in.
Mainly, it has to do with the fact that H264 is blatantly patent encumbered, whereas the patent trolls would have to at least put some effort into trying to make a patent claim with WebM.
Have you not heard? "Sharing" is a bad thing. If the website were called, "rapidfiletransfer," maybe they wouldn't be facing these sorts of accusations...
betterunixthanunix seems to have no human compassion. I'm a father of two and do you think I would care about their success rates if they could save my kid? I don't think the other parents do either.
It is not a question of compassion, it is a question of whether or not the program has accomplished anything, and there is literally no evidence that AMBER alerts actually save children from harm. You say you do not care about success rates? Why not sacrifice small animals when children go missing? Why not cast stones? There is about as much empirical evidence for AMBER as there is for voodoo.
You can look it up yourself -- AMBER alerts almost always failed in cases where standard investigative techniques failed.
Assuming, of course, that you can remember everyone's faces hours or days later. Sure, if the kidnapper has some highly distinctive feature, like a big scare on his face or an unusual tattoo, or was driving a vehicle that was very unusual, it might work. As it turns out, though, most kidnappers do not have such features, and your likelihood of remembering some ordinary looking person you saw for a few moments is low.
Actually, it is not a result of poisoning the data; AMBER alerts almost always fail in cases of children being abducted by people who plan to harm or kill them. The authors basically say that the success rate of AMBER is inflated by the inclusion of custodial cases, and that if those cases are excluded AMBER has a success rate that is nearly 0. AMBER has not actually augmented traditional police techniques in any meaningful way; in cases where traditional investigative methods fail, AMBER fails as well.
(Apologies to people who might not be able to access that article because of a paywall)
The executive summary is that this article does answer your question: a whopping 50% of the AMBER alerts issued in 2004 were cases of non-threatening custody disputes. Other evidence gathered between 2002 and 2006 indicates that AMBER alert was most likely to be successful in cases where the abducted child was not in any danger (familial abductions) and least likely to be successful (to the point of accomplishing almost nothing at all) in cases where the child was in serious danger i.e. the cases AMBER was supposed to address.
Sorry, but you are talking about a program whose "success" -- which has been disputed by researchers anyway -- is several orders of magnitude less than the number of reported abductions. Independent researchers have classified AMBER Alert as theatrical, saying that in terms of saving lives or saving children from dangerous situations (which is what it was created for) it has basically accomplished nothing. According to the research, most cases of AMBER Alert successes have been custody battles in which the child was not in any danger at all, and in most cases AMBER alerts play almost no role in returning abducted children to their families. Hey, you can read about it for yourself:
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, classic bait and switch.
Humans have had an undeniable impact on the global environment -- there is really no point in questioning that anymore. As for dying, well, nobody is claiming that our doom is near at hand, just that things are going to get a lot different and that we should be prepared for it, and perhaps taking steps to slow or halt the rate at which we emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We are already over the edge; it is a question of whether or not we want to worsen things for ourselves (or at least make things change more significantly than they are already destined to change).
I do not see anyone suing Glock.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000485.html
Last I checked, a high end GPU costs quite a bit more than $1.68, and if you are just going to crack a few WPA keys, why would you want to spend so much money?
what role should Amazon and other public-cloud service providers play in preventing customers from using their services to commit crimes?"
No role whatsoever; let law enforcement agencies handle criminal investigations.
The problem is that the AMBER Alert system was created as the result of a moral panic -- a widespread belief that strangers who want to harm children are all over the place, waiting to kidnap an innocent child. If the AMBER Alert program was actually saving children from harm, I could shrug off the fact that it is symptomatic of a moral panic, because the benefits would outweigh the costs. Yet independent researchers have found that the system has done nothing to save children from harm, and that in cases where standard police techniques fail to rescue a child, AMBER alerts almost always fail. Worse, though, is that law enforcement agencies and politicians are parading AMBER as a system that is saving lives, which actually serves to reinforce the very moral panic that gave rise to AMBER in the first place.
The moral panic is really the problem here. As some have pointed out, most people will help a child who asks for help; kidnappers are extremely rare. Yet we are constantly telling children to never talk to strangers, and so a lost child might actually fail to ask for help from people who could offer it (perhaps by using a cell phone). Elsewhere in the comments, someone cited a case of a man who left a lost toddler out in the middle of nowhere, because he did not want to risk being labelled as a predator or kidnapper.
Finally, researchers have pointed out that if AMBER were used properly, it would not be very successful. In most cases, when a child is kidnapped by someone who intends to do the child harm, the kidnapper harms the child before the police have a chance to determine that the case meets the criteria for an AMBER alert. This trend is reflected by the evidence that AMBER alerts fail to save lives in cases where standard police techniques fail.
So, while the tiny handful of parents who got lucky and had their children saved by an AMBER alert would probably disagree, I would say that all of the time, energy, and money that went into the AMBER system could be better spent on something else.
Perhaps, as an act of protest, we should buy these consoles, dismantle them, and sell them for parts. Just to hurt Sony's bottom line.
Well, he is already being punished; it is to the point where he has to be given antidepressants just to be kept alive. He is not allowed to have bedsheets, last I checked (I assume this is because he might try to hang himself). He has been in solitary confinement for many months now, which is extremely difficult to endure and which can have long lasting or even permanent effects on people.
I suppose there might be some disagreement on the meaning of "right to a speedy trial" or "due process," but I am a bit confused as to how the treatment of Manning passes constitutional muster. I understand that he is subject to military law, not civilian law, but it is still troubling.
I can't speak for him, but I certainly think it is bad. These sorts of restricted and locked down computers (yes, we are talking about computers, even if they are dressed differently) are a bad thing for society. Now, as for the impact on the open web, I suppose one could argue that video game systems are not drawing efforts away from websites (nobody is talking publishing newspapers exclusively on video game consoles, last I checked), but the broader effect on society (e.g. dividing people, keeping free software out) is largely the same.
You'll hear the same arguments against other locked down systems from me, but then again, I am admittedly in a minority.
Worse still, Linux distros that toss H.264 into their repositories could be left in a precarious position -- do they need to use the "as part of an OS" license structure, the "not as part of an OS license structure," or what? Users who download the software over BitTorrent could also be left in a precarious position -- do they owe money to MPEG LA also?
It is really a simple matter: H.264 licensing is not compatible with free software licensing or the free software distribution model. Why anyone would say otherwise is a mystery to me.
I guess we could all argue semantics but the definition of Free/Open Source really needs to be expanded to specifically exclude patent-encumbered technologies that do not grant unlimited, royalty-free use in both commercial and non-commercial uses alike.
Allow me to introduce you to GPLv3:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
Sure, we can stick with H.264, just as soon as we invalidate software patents. Or if MPEG LA suddenly decides to relicense H.264 so that it is compatible with libre licenses.
The problem is that H.264's license structure is based around traditional producer-consumer relationships, which is not compatible with the concept behind free software. Royalty payments are inherently incompatible with the free software model, because it prevents people from liberally copying and sharing software. Note that royalties are the problem; other payment models are perfectly fine (I can, for example, charge you money for copies of Debian -- prior to widely available broadband connections, this sort of thing was not so uncommon).
H264 is not open, it is patent encumbered, it will not be open until all relevant (a word which has become very stretched recently) patents have expired. The Ars article tries to address this by claiming that there are no royalties that need to be paid for videos that can be accessed without a paywall; yet the document they cite says this is only for "0 - 100,000 units" which clearly creates a problem for libre software that has millions of users. Furthermore, the line that the licensing terms draws for "(a)" and "(b)" sublicensing is artificial and wholly incompatible with free software licensing.
If only it were a simple matter of technology, we could all agree with you. Unfortunately, H264 is a serious problem in the USA, because of software patents and license requirements. You cannot produce legal free software H264 editors in this country, nor can you import legally produced software from other countries. True, patent trolls will probably find a way to corrupt WebM, but at least they would have to put some effort in.
Mainly, it has to do with the fact that H264 is blatantly patent encumbered, whereas the patent trolls would have to at least put some effort into trying to make a patent claim with WebM.
Have you not heard? "Sharing" is a bad thing. If the website were called, "rapidfiletransfer," maybe they wouldn't be facing these sorts of accusations...
betterunixthanunix seems to have no human compassion. I'm a father of two and do you think I would care about their success rates if they could save my kid? I don't think the other parents do either.
It is not a question of compassion, it is a question of whether or not the program has accomplished anything, and there is literally no evidence that AMBER alerts actually save children from harm. You say you do not care about success rates? Why not sacrifice small animals when children go missing? Why not cast stones? There is about as much empirical evidence for AMBER as there is for voodoo.
You can look it up yourself -- AMBER alerts almost always failed in cases where standard investigative techniques failed.
Assuming, of course, that you can remember everyone's faces hours or days later. Sure, if the kidnapper has some highly distinctive feature, like a big scare on his face or an unusual tattoo, or was driving a vehicle that was very unusual, it might work. As it turns out, though, most kidnappers do not have such features, and your likelihood of remembering some ordinary looking person you saw for a few moments is low.
Actually, it is not a result of poisoning the data; AMBER alerts almost always fail in cases of children being abducted by people who plan to harm or kill them. The authors basically say that the success rate of AMBER is inflated by the inclusion of custodial cases, and that if those cases are excluded AMBER has a success rate that is nearly 0. AMBER has not actually augmented traditional police techniques in any meaningful way; in cases where traditional investigative methods fail, AMBER fails as well.
Well, the independent research seems to suggest something a little different:
http://cjr.sagepub.com/content/33/2/159.abstract?rss=1
(Apologies to people who might not be able to access that article because of a paywall)
The executive summary is that this article does answer your question: a whopping 50% of the AMBER alerts issued in 2004 were cases of non-threatening custody disputes. Other evidence gathered between 2002 and 2006 indicates that AMBER alert was most likely to be successful in cases where the abducted child was not in any danger (familial abductions) and least likely to be successful (to the point of accomplishing almost nothing at all) in cases where the child was in serious danger i.e. the cases AMBER was supposed to address.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/abducted/
Sorry, but you are talking about a program whose "success" -- which has been disputed by researchers anyway -- is several orders of magnitude less than the number of reported abductions. Independent researchers have classified AMBER Alert as theatrical, saying that in terms of saving lives or saving children from dangerous situations (which is what it was created for) it has basically accomplished nothing. According to the research, most cases of AMBER Alert successes have been custody battles in which the child was not in any danger at all, and in most cases AMBER alerts play almost no role in returning abducted children to their families. Hey, you can read about it for yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_Alert#Controversy_about_success_rate
I did not say that I had better ideas; however, I am not the only person to point out that the AMBER Alert system is not highly effective:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/abducted/